Java News from Saturday, November 1, 2008

Stephen Colebourne has released
Joda-Time 1.6, an open source (Apache license)
calendar library.
"Joda-Time provides a quality replacement for the Java date and time classes. The design allows for multiple calendar systems, while still providing a simple API. The 'default' calendar is the ISO8601 standard which is used by XML. The Gregorian, Julian, Buddhist, Coptic, Ethiopic and Islamic systems are also included, and we welcome further additions. Supporting classes include time zone, duration, format and parsing." Joda-Time is a definbite improvement on the standard java.util.Calendar/java.util.Date classes. It still strikes me as excessively complicated, but maybe that's just because time and dates are excessively complicated.
Java 1.4 or later is required.